Rain dampens speed at Goodwood Festival
Come for the meal; stay for the show.
The meal — a feast for the ages, actually — is the Goodwood Festival of Speed, held annually on the estate belonging to Charles Henry Gordon-Lennox, Earl of March. Staged every summer since 1993, the Festival of Speed, cleverly called “the world’s largest automotive garden party,” is set against the backdrop of Goodwood House in West Sussex, England. Here, more than 600 cars and motorcycles, literally spanning the history of motorsport, are on display.
Name your passion: Formula One cars from past and present? Check. Group B rally cars? Ditto. NASCAR stockers? Uh-huh. Add brutal Can-Am, Indy and DTM racers, prewar Silver Arrows from Audi and Mercedes, two-stroke Grand Prix bikes, not to mention multimillions worth of the most desirable sports and GT cars, and one has only started scratching the surface. This year’s theme, Full Throttle — The Endless Pursuit of Power, is anything but hyperbole, celebrating speed, competition and bravery, with hundreds of epic racing machines spanning more than a century.
The best part? These gleaming, shiny machines of lust and longing don’t just sit around, appreciating in value by the minute. Most of them, many driven by heroes of motorsport — Emerson Fittipaldi, Nico Rosberg, Lewis Hamilton, Derek Bell, Giacomo Agostini and a couple of dozen others — take to the hill climb, a 1.8-kilometre blast up the driveway to and beyond Goodwood House. The fastest cars — invariably modern F1 cars — make it to the top in a little more than 40 seconds … in dry weather and when the drivers aren’t playing to the crowd with smoky burnouts and tire-shredding doughnuts.
The show part is literal, as in the Goodwood Moving Motor Show, which, this year, features the first appearance (either worldwide or in Europe) of more than 20 highly desirable and generally fast new cars, including the McLaren 570S Sprint, Porsche 911 R, Ferrari 488 Spider, Audi S5 Coupe and Tesla Model X, just to name a few. They, too, make an appearance on the hill climb. As well, many of the manufacturers — Audi, Mercedes, Porsche, Chevrolet, Mazda, Jaguar, Lexus and others — construct elaborate displays with a full range of product to tempt motor heads, of which well over 150,000 come from near and far to see the fourday spectacle in rain or shine.
Unfortunately, it was a lot of the former and not enough of the latter at this year’s event, with sudden showers turning much of the grounds into a muddy mess and delaying portions of the hill climb. It also meant the drivers were a little circumspect when heading up the hill, lest lack of traction put their prized chariots into the hay bales.
Frankly, between the crowds, the bales and the umbrellas, it was hard to get a clear view of the action, though the thunderous, shrieking sounds of revving engines and tortured rubber provided an audible clue. Better to walk the paddocks, where the cars rested between spins up the hill. Not only could you get up close and personal to multimillion-dollar sports cars such as a 1950 Ferrari 166 Barchetta (a personal favourite, which just happens to be owned by Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason) or D-Type Jaguar, but race cars of all ages and stripes. And you meet the most interesting people, happy to talk about their cars.
Sitting by a gaudy purple-ish 1963 Ford Galaxie stock car was a kind-faced older gentleman. In a light southern accent he introduced himself. “Hi, I’m Lee Holman.” Then your eye drifts to the big Ford’s front fender where, under the “advertised” horsepower of the car — 410 — reads “Competition Proven By Holman Moody.” Oh, that Holman, of Holman Moody. The family business out of Charlotte, N.C., is NASCAR royalty, Ford’s factory race car and engine builders back in the day.
Pointing to the Galaxie, Holman, 71, says it had been driven by the
It was pouring and I had no wipers on the car so I couldn’t see anything. But I kept going and made it to the top.
likes of early stock car heroes Junior Johnson, Fred Lorenzen and Fireball Roberts. Holman says the company used to build 60 to 70 stock cars a year for various Ford teams, which would lease the cars and “run them until they wrecked.” Then the cars would be brought in the back doors, rebuilt and sent back out the front, though not necessarily to the same team.
“Ford wanted the cars pretty equal,” Holman says. “Our factory could make pretty much the entire car except for the rubber and windshields.
The Galaxie, which Holman ran up the hill, was in Darlington Raceway’s museum from 1964 to 2010. “Then I called them up and said I wanted my car back.” And the “real” horsepower of the 427 hirise V8? Holman says it’s about 570.
“I’ve had the pleasure of being here three times for the Festival of Speed and twice for the Revival.” Looking around at the crowds, he adds, “I always think they (the organizers) can never top this, but they do. Nothing else on the planet can top this.”
Then there’s Robert Auxier, from Tempe, Ariz., who tried for 20 years to buy the car he now owns.
He says he had to wait for the previous owner of the 1964 Cheetah to die before he purchased the race car from the estate. Auxier says the bob-tailed roller skate, a contemporary of the Shelby Cobra, only even more bad-ass, is one of 29 made (some sources say even fewer were built by Anaheim, Calif.-based builder Bill Thomas), and of which only 15 survive today. What makes his car unique, Auxier says, is that his is the only big-block Chevy-powered, wide-bodied model made. The car had originally been fitted with a 327-cubic inch V8. Over the years, it was upgraded to a 377, a 396 and finally, a monster 427 L88 V8.
Auxier says Goodwood is “the greatest car experience I’ve ever had to date.”
He called his run up the hill in the 650-hp, 90-inch-wheelbase Cheetah “fabulous.”
“It was pouring and I had no wipers on the car so I couldn’t see anything. But I kept going and made it to the top. The Porsche behind me went off.”